OffSetLab

Seems like I've been starting drafts of new articles, but nothing either sticks or is polished enough for publishing. I guess it's not an uncommon occurrence when writing a blog and happens to the best of us.

To fight this slump, I have decided to just go on and publish something and so, instead of a concrete topic, here is a breakdown of some of the things we've been doing for some time now and other stuff that happened.

Programming: Mostly poking around. Vesna is still learning the React framework so we hope to publish some new things as well as revisit some old ones. To say that we should push hard as the end of the year approaches is an understatement.

Art: I'm sketching every day. I'm even thinking about turning it into a 365 challenge since I've been sketching for nearly a hundred days now. As usual, you can check the progress in my DeviantArt scrapbook. Inktober also came and went, but I didn't feel confident to try it. The painting part is clumsy and it seems like I need more time for it, but time is difficult to find. I bought Corel Painter 2016 just recently to put a bit more pressure on myself, that's always a good idea. I've watched all the videos on the CtrlPaint, but I still need to read up on some art theory.

Social concern: The summit on the climate change is happening in Paris these days. There was a worldwide protest that we attended here in Dublin. Unfortunately, in Croatia there's little to no press coverage on this important topic. It is vital to show the people in power that we need the change, but (for good or bad) I still can't fight the jaded feeling that the march was used as a platform for scoring political points under the guise of environmental concern.

There is so much going wrong in the world at any point in time. China is under-reporting its coal usage and I doubt that the rest of the countries are being completely upfront with the real numbers.

In other news, we are overusing antibiotics and the bacteria's resistance is going rampant. We might see the future where we are unable to fight simple bacteria if we don't the use of antibiotic with more responsibility. Their use in mass farming contributes to the resistance.

On the upside, the ban on cosmetics that are tested on animals is in place in the EU since 2013. I still get to learn something new every day.

I've had this lying in drafts for a long time. I never seem to have the time to put it somewhere so here it is. The meal serves three to four, depending on what you put together with it.

Ingredients:

• 500 g fresh tofu
• 3 tbs cornstarch
• 3 tbs soy sauce (low sodium)
• 3 tbs sriracha sauce (chilli, garlic)
• 3 tbs maple syrup (agava can fit in)
• 2 tbs oil (coconut is nice)
• 1 tbs balsamic vinegar
• 3 pressed cloves of garlic
• pinch of salt
• 2 tbs sesame seeds
• 50 g roasted peanuts
• 50 g roasted cashews

Preparation:

Cut tofu to 1.5 - 2.0 cm cubes and coat them in cornstarch. Put them on a baking paper and in the oven on 200 °C for 20 minutes or until they get crunchy and become golden on the edges. While the tofu is baking, prepare the sauce. In a cup, put soy sauce, sriracha, maple syrup, oil, vinegar, garlic and salt. If your soy sauce is very salty, avoid adding salt. Mix well and put aside. In a frying pan, put sesame seeds and toast them lightly. Before the sesame browns, add peanuts and cashews and toast them a bit as well. When the sesame is toasted and has released its aroma and oil, pour in the sauce and mix everything. The temperature at this point is likely to be very high so the sauce might sizzle violently. Turn off the heat or remove the pan from the stove altogether to counter the reaction a bit. When all is well mixed, put in the crunchy tofu and mix again until everything is well coated. Serve while it's hot with boiled vegetables like cauliflower, broccoli, carrot or similar, or even a bowl of rice with curry.

Notes:

Don't be afraid to experiment. Of course you can substitute things. I'm sure it will be OK. Preparation time is fairly short and all can be done in half an hour, even if you decide to boil vegetables on the side. Remember to eat everything, otherwise you're contributing to waste.

The word "free" in the title refers to both the "free speech" and the "free beer" paradigms. The former is preferable, but I'll talk about both. Homo Ludens, right? Also, "entertainment", so I won't delve into how fun learning can be even though information that facilitates learning can be fairly easily obtained. This can also encompass access to materials that are needed for some type of work, but that is a topic for another article.

I was told some years ago that it was impossible to get entertainment without paying for it. This is simply wrong and ties in with the mainstream point of view. What it really tries to suggest is that it is impossible to get mainstream entertainment without paying for it, which is wrong as well, but now at least we are getting to something.

Mainstream is something we find universally consumed, it satisfies the common denominator of taste and receives a lion's share of spotlight. On the other end of the divide are all things niche and divergent, pushed to the margins of consumption, difficult to define by themselves, but easy to recognize in opposition to the mainstream.

This inevitably leads to the topic of piracy and I do know that this topic is extensive, but I'll just paraphrase Cory Doctorow by saying that the problem for artists is not piracy, it is obscurity.

We're witnessing information anxiety as is, and the amount of information we are exposed to is huge. This leads to some things being swept under the rug or never reaching an audience. With the lack of knowledge or money, people are less likely to even manage to push out their work, let alone reach some sort of popularity. Google is digitizing books and offering them as search results, although keeping the copyright in place because it only shows snippets. There have been some problems with this approach, but in most ways digitizing books preserves the information for the future.

Each country imposes some form of legislation pertaining to the copyright of works. The most common approach allows copyright to expire after some time so that the work subsequently falls into the public domain, which means that anyone can use it however they wish. In the grey areas of copyright coverage orphan works persist, their creators or rights holders deceased or impossible to find. Abandonware is a good example of this. Even though the copyright is still in place, the original author makes no money off of it and does not try to do so.

When works are essentially accessed without permission, we are talking about piracy. The justifiability of acquiring works against their copyright, regardless of whether they have been abandoned, or are unavailable in a location, or are neither of those things, is, however, a topic of a much larger debate.

In the end, some artists deliberately publish their works without copyright or with explicit terms of conditions that their work cannot be copyrighted by someone else. Sometimes this is dubbed copyleft or publishing the works under creative commons where some rights are reserved, but not all and the author does not earn money off of things, yet still holds the rights to do whatever he wishes with his work.

Since so many things have been digitized in some way and published online, the argument from the beginning of the article, that it is impossible to find entertainment without paying for it, does not hold entirely true. Piracy aside, as well as infotainment, which conceals from us things that are maybe better tailored to our tastes than what the mainstream is pushing on us, there are various services online that publish works that can be obtained for free.

Here's a rough list and it is likely to be extended and put somewhere for easy access:

• Books
  • Project Gutenberg
• Music
  • A whole lot of internet radio stations
  • Jamendo
  • Magnatune
  • Bandcamp
  • Soundcloud
• Visual
  • GoogleArt
• Games
  • Abandonia
• Culture
  • Europeana

Other popular services like GOG, Steam, Amazon books and similar are offering some free content as well, but their main source of revenue is selling things. Some services sometimes end up hosting copyrighted work that is accessible to everyone and the works are taken down ASAP. Youtube is an example of this, but what is seen cannot be taken back. Still they combat this as much as they can. This is just a random occurrence and if you want copyrighted work, you still have to buy it.

To earn enough money to get by and continue creating, artists have to publish their work through various services, but the more popular the service is, the more they have to be popular in order to get a minimum wage. This is something to think about. The best option in the end is to donate directly.

Lastly, I use a lot of the mentioned free services myself and I never lacked entertainment in any form. You should try it yourself and stop using peer pressure as an excuse.

I already described the purpose of BOINC in the post titled Contributing to society. To expand a bit on it, but still keep it rudimentary, BOINC works by crunching numbers for a project of your own choosing. It will wait for the system to get idle and activate. If you're doing something else, it will wait. This enables you to use your system as usual and when you're doing nothing, it will progress the project a bit. For BOINC to work, you have to have a working internet connection so it can download the files it needs to process before returning the result back to the server. This is the basis of grid computing.

If you're on DigitalOcean or a similar provider, you pay money to have your instance up and running. Most of the time, for a small user, the instance will idle. It would be better utilized if it was doing something. For the record, this instance is processing some data but this blog itself is static. The utilization of the system is miniscule as can be seen in the usage graphs on the DigitalOcean account page. To get the most out of it and contribute to the society, you can put your system to do some work.

This tutorial is written for the Ubuntu droplet, but your setup might differ. The ideas are taken from Scott Miller and Logan Marchione.

For starters, I have been running BOINC for some time so I already have an account. The same goes for the droplet so I don't have to go through initial setup for those. You can refer to the official documentation on both sides.

I installed a BOINC client via terminal. Since the droplet is headless, I don't need a GUI.:

sudo apt-get install boinc-client

I already have an account crunching numbers for the Malaria disease behaviour so I need the account key from it. I can see the key on the account page.

Using that account key, I can attach the droplet instance to it.:

boinccmd --project_attach http://www.malariacontrol.net/ account_key

When you attach a project like that, BOINC will start working immediately. By default, it will use 100% of the CPU which is bad for the other VMs running on the same KVM. You must not be a "noisy neighbour". Otherwise you will most likely get banned from your DigitalOcean account. YMMV at this point since you might be using your droplet instance for other things. I'll set up my limit to 65% since I'm not using a lot of CPU and I've asked their support about running BOINC. The 65% came as a recommendation from them.

For this to take effect, on my account page, under computing preferences, I'll set up separate settings for this machine. I add the profiles for "work" and set the CPU usage to 65%. Idle detection is somewhat problematic, so I'll set the suspend work unrestricted.

And then, when checking the machines under "computers on this account" details, I can associate the droplet instance with the new profile with the location setting.

Next time it connects, it will pick up those settings. However, you can update and restart the process with the following commands.:

boinccmd --project http://www.malariacontrol.net/ update
sudo service boinc-client restart

Soon enough, the results should be visible on the account pages for both BOINC and DigitalOcean. Happy crunching.

Starting a new drawing can be daunting. Staring at a blank paper still scares me even though I try to tell myself that there is nothing to be afraid of, that I am allowed to fail. I can only learn something here and the drawing I produce need not be "good"; it's just another step in the process. I have to make it a mantra of sorts because I'm not just trying to learn how to draw well, but also to change some aspects of my personality. I firmly subscribe to the "measure twice, cut once" school of thought, which can be something of a double-edged sword when trying to put down that first line. Doodling helps here because I can be relaxed and just, well, doodle, but at one point getting serious about drawing requires thinking and observing the subject that is drawn.

As part of me getting back in shape I figured I should put my training wheels back on and draw more with traditional tools. At least in the beginning. Good foundations come a long way. Back in the art school we were given some instructions on starting, so let me reiterate here some tips for approaching the work from the very beginning. Just will, paper and pencil will do.

Visual measuring, when drawing from life, is done using a pencil or any kind of straight stick. An arm holding the pencil is extended to primarily measure two things: the angles of observed objects in relation to the paper's borders, and the proportions, which come down to how the object's parts relate to the entire object, i.e. how many times a part fits into the whole (the simplest example of this is determining the human head - body ratio based on how many times the size of the head should fit inside the size of the body). This is also used for measuring the so called negative space in the composition, the negative space being, for instance, the distance between an object and the edge of a paper, as well as the space between all the objects that are to be drawn on one paper. The positive space are the objects that are being drawn.

The most important thing while drawing is placing the first line and visual measuring helps a lot here. If the first line is wrong, the whole drawing can go wrong. Digital drawing can alleviate this by letting you transform and move that line and even by resizing the canvas, but traditional drawing is less forgiving. If you erase the line too many times, you damage the paper or make too big of a mess, so trial and error is not exactly the best option. Also try drawing with a pen at first because you cannot erase the lines, don't worry about shading at all. Using visual measurement helps train the hand as well as the eye, it boosts memory and can even help relax a person doing the drawing. This part of the drawing process involves a lot of thinking and at first doesn't come intuitively.

Remember that "measure twice" principle? Here is where it comes in handy. Observe and think.

Other useful techniques that can help out when starting a drawing are the contour drawing - drawing the outline of an object - which trains the eye to notice details, and the linear block-in - drawing a boxy shape to encapsulate the object and then drawing smaller boxes within it, around the object's parts, until the block model produces a reasonably detailed simplification of the object's shape. I also found that drawing a lot of circles can bring about a shape of an object fairly quickly.

The point of these techniques is to facilitate practice and produce sketches, which can and will usually look messy and ugly. That is OK because the refinement will come later. In this case there's no need for an eraser that much because drawing a wrong line can help the next one to be placed better than the last one.

I am doodling every day and the results are in my scraps page of the DeviantArt account. You can check my progress there as well.